Developer Health

Does your developer team health suffer from working over capacity and having too ambitious goals?

Purpose

This report gauges your developer team's health by comparing it to the industry benchmark on capacity. In particular, it provides insights into the PR load for teams and each team member over time.

A high PR load means having PR tickets opened and juggled by a contributor simultaneously. This might lead to overloading the developer and poor outcomes due to the many parallel tasks. It can also slow the overall delivery because of context switching and delays.

Improvement Actions: For overloaded teams or contributors can be helpful to redistribute some work, reduce the overall load, or add additional resourcing.

Another aspect is ensuring smooth review and approval flows, as well as supportive infrastructure such as reliable and fast-build systems.

Explanations

A team member is regarded as overloaded if he/she has more than a specific number of total PRs open at any given point in time. The default threshold is 5 PRs per week.

Overloaded Team: The percentage of team members with too many PRs open at any given moment means they had too many parallel tasks.

Team PR Health: The trend of development team health. It shows the percentage of the team members that were overloaded as a trend over time. High overloads for sustained periods of time indicate teams that might generally be under-resourced and are under sustained pressure.

Overloaded Developers: Individual contributors who are currently deemed overloaded and have a history of their load. If a contributor has too much on for too long, they are at risk of suffering from burnout and productivity challenges affecting the whole team.

Good to Know

It is common that at certain times, specific contributors might have too many open PRs when waiting for reviews or fixes to the build system. However, if this affects large parts of the team, productivity might be at risk, leading to poor delivery results or high talent churn.